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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING THIS WEEK 👀

Every Monday morning, the Milk Road team hops on a call.

No scripts. No teleprompters. Just a bunch of people who stare at charts and headlines for a living, arguing about what matters this week.

Here's what came up this morning - the stuff we're excited about, the stuff we're nervous about, and the stuff keeping us up at night…

Crypto is stuck in a holding pattern:

BTC has been ranging - bouncing between the same levels like a pinball that's lost its momentum. March gave us a light bullish bounce, but nothing convincing. 

No breakout. No breakdown. Just… grinding sideways.

The team's base case? April weakness is probably coming.

But there's one thing that could change the whole picture: The CLARITY Act.

(Aka: the comprehensive rulebook for crypto in the U.S., that will give institutions and companies the green light to invest/build in crypto.)

If it passes out of the Senate committee, John thinks it could "break the market higher" by lifting the massive cloud of regulatory uncertainty hanging over the space.

The problem? The market still has the odds of it passing into law this year at roughly 50/50. Literally a coin flip.

So for now, we wait. Everyone's watching for the flip - that one catalyst that confirms whether we move higher or roll over.

But crypto wasn't the topic that dominated our call this morning.

The Strait of Hormuz was…

WHAT WE'RE WATCHING THIS WEEK (P2) 👀

Quick geography lesson: 

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, where a huge chunk of the world's energy, chemicals, and raw materials flow every single day.

And right now, it's effectively closed.

The ongoing Iran conflict has choked shipping through the strait, and oil prices keep climbing. 

For a while, traders were banking on what they call the "TACO" trade - Trump Always Chickens Out. The idea being that Trump would eventually de-escalate once markets sold off hard enough.

That happened - Markets sold off and Trump chickened out. But it didn’t work.

So now there's a new acronym floating around: "NACHO":

And this goes beyond just oil:

‘Cause sure, roughly 21% of the world's petroleum and 21% of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows through the strait… 

But it also carries nearly half of the world's urea exports - a nitrogen-based fertilizer and one of the most important inputs in global food production. 

About 30-35% of all traded nitrogen fertilizers move through this chokepoint!

And when hoarding starts… John put it bluntly: 

There's a "non-zero chance of a lot of people dying". Cascading food shortages in vulnerable regions. Real human cost.

On top of that, Tomas flagged something almost nobody is talking about - helium. Qatar produces roughly 30-33% of the world's helium supply.

Helium is a critical input for semiconductor manufacturing (used in cooling systems and chip etching). With Qatar's exports curtailed, the AI and chip boom just picked up another risk factor.

Food, energy, and chips. All under pressure. All at the same time.

And the scary part? Even if the strait reopens tomorrow, you can't just flip a switch.

Restarting production and loading tankers takes weeks to months. Damaged terminals, pipelines, and processing plants could take years to fully repair. 

Skilled workers leave. Maintenance gets deferred. Secondary supply chains break down in ways that compound on each other.

John closed the conversation paraphrasing something that Rory Johnston (Twitter’s favorite oil quant and a guest on tomorrow’s Milk Road Macro show) has been repeating:

"No one is grasping just how bad this is." 👇

Long story longer: this touches everything.

Stay sharp out there. We'll see you tomorrow.

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